Miriam Schapiro, an only child, was born into a creative family of Russian-Jewish heritage that supported her desire at a young age to become an artist. Her father was an artist and industrial designer, who began teaching her art when she was six...

Schapiro found success early as a hard-edge geometric-style painter. Influenced by the feminist movement of the early 1970s, she changed her style radically, embracing the use of textiles as symbolic of feminine labor...

Miriam Schapiro has evolved from the grand gesture of Action Painting in the 1950s to a hard-edge geometric art in the 1960s to the political stance and stridency of Feminist Art with Judy Chicago in the 1970s, to arrive, finally, at her own feminine voice of decorative art and pattern painting as represented in the Wake Forest work, What is Paradise...